We Can Learn On All Levels
Lessons from Before a Bank Robber’s Criminal Career, and Beyond
I woke up in prison. Had my conscience revived. That’s when I recalled the wisdom folks had passed on to me over the years.
One example. My community college freshman Western Civilization professor looked like the actress Linda Hunt. She amazed me. I remember that. But her only words that stuck: “We can learn on all levels. From the drunk on the curb, to the CEO in the boardroom. They all have something to teach us.”
So I went in search of teachers. And boy oh boy have I had some doozys.
First, the dreamers who loved me, who hoped that loving the scared boy thrashing in my cocoon would somehow defeat my defensive insecurities and allow me to turn into the gentle butterfly they believed I was meant to be. Their capacity to concentrate on a person outside of themselves proved self-destructive for them, but hugely instructive for me. We cannot change people. Only, it turns out, ourselves, and even then, barely.
Other instructors: The prisoner who clutched desperately to the word “Respect” when it was patently clear they were petty, bitter men with an adolescent grudge against society, men and women who also didn’t respect anything — their families, their communities, themselves even — taught me the self-sabotaging power of daily keeping our wounds before our eyes. I learned that anger always disguises those wounds.
I read once how a monk stepped out of his cell, turned around and bowed to the empty cell, thanking the confined quarters for being his teacher. Solitary confinement taught me the paradoxical truth that the worst experience in the world can also provide some wonderfully sublime emancipations. That within dense solitude one can approach a freedom generally elusive in the pell-mell pace of the world.
I wrote an essay for the LA Weekly when I was barely 6-months out of prison. One of the Letters to the Editor said that I was released from prison too soon. Another said I should have been hung. This was January 1997, a bit before trolls became a thick part of our online imaginations. As I wrote more Op-eds in national newspapers I discovered that I loved provoking people to reply maliciously, to hold me up to their moral code and find me wanting. I treated those drive-by spewings as proof that I could find the crazy rampant pettiness of every prison tier I spent time on all around me in free society. The hidden likenesses between the prison tier and the streets became everywhere apparent to me.
I began to take college courses behind bars ini 1994, after I changed my life. Professors from Harvard, Boston University, Brandeis, M.I.T., they came in and taught us linguistics, philosophy, economics, etc.. When the first class essay was due I was so harassed by the expectation that I be a good student that I actually fantasized about walking into class and punching the teacher in the mouth. I expected to get expelled. In my cell, with that blank page before me, I heard a voice in my head taunting me, saying, “That professor thinks you’re a punk. He thinks you’re weak. He expects you to follow his orders, he snaps his assignment fingers and you jump like a dog.” Knowledge had always been a weapon for me, a way to win fights. That day I decided to try and turn my knowledges into something much less aligned with my argumentative self, something adaptable to the personable and healing-based man I wanted to become.
Then there was my daughter. 12 years later. Matilde was born and it felt like that first night in the hospital room someone snuck in and shot every fear in my body with a big batch of green Hulkish steroids. I woke terrified everyday for the next 18 months that because this little bundle of person enjoyed all my love then any second the universe was going to snatch her from me and a repeat of my mother’s death when I was 9 was going to crush me all over again.
But one dark night I discovered the strength inherent in our vulnerabilities. A strange mansuetude washed over my body, baptizing me in a wonderful joy.
I realized that Matilde does not belong to me. It would have been nice for someone to teach me this after my mother’s died. But now I knew that death and loss are designed into every birth. Matilde’s literal birth, yes, but also the birth of our love story. I enjoyed my baby girl, but I did not own her. And we cannot lose what was never ours. Matilde belongs to herself, and my purpose as a father is simple: to raise her so she joins you as an adult with curiosity to find her purpose in the world, hopefully with love, good humor, and a sense that after all is said and done, she is the love who she’s been looking for.
I’ve known a ton of love in my life. I am ridiculously blessed in this regard. And I have succeeded in my post-prison life only because people have allowed/afforded/provided/wished/given me fantastic support.
Today I am grateful for the love of all the teachers and in my life. I’m also glad I’m able to turn every experience into a teachable moment.
Turns out my Linda Hunt lookalike college professor was correct 35 years ago: I have indeed learned on all levels.
